Between the still-hidden tax returns, the promotion of Trump products and businesses, and the push to use his status as nominee to push deals in foreign nations, everyone paying even the slightest bit of attention during the campaign could predict that Donald Trump would be, if voted into office, the crookedest president ever. Nobody cared. He should have just made it a campaign promise—that way, he'd actually have kept one.
As President Donald Trump enters his third month in office, he has already established at least one record, however dubious: the president most open and willing to use the prestige of the White House to enrich himself and his family.
“I’m at a loss,” said Robert Maguire, an investigator with the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that advocates for more transparency in government and campaigns. “This idea that the presidency is something to enrich your private interest to the extent he’s doing, not by going on the speaking tour or getting a big book deal after he leaves office, but while he’s in office, sort of milking the office for all it’s worth ― it’s tacky.”
To recap: His Florida club has now doubled its member fees, citing access to a sitting president as a reason, and Trump appears at the business nearly every weekend to make those new fees worth it. His Washington hotel is overflowing with foreign dignitaries and domestic business heads eager to gain Trump's ear by stuffing money into his company's pockets. His family, allegedly the ones to whom he has passed the family business so as to avoid conflict, have regularly attended White House meetings with foreign heads of state and, of course, an unending stream of business leaders. He keeps a second home in New York, protected by the Secret Service on the taxpayer dime, and a third home in Florida, also protected by the Secret Service on the taxpayer dime, and visits his businesses every single weekend without fail.
Trump’s behavior has no precedent, going back to at least the turn of the last century, ethics experts say. Even in the presidency most often associated with open corruption, it was Warren Harding’s Interior secretary, not Harding himself, who had taken bribes in the Teapot Dome oil lease scandal.
Warren Harding was a piker. Trump, on the other hand, is treating the presidency as family cash machine.
Eric Trump earlier this month even boasted about how well it is going. “I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been,” he told the New York Times.
Meanwhile, the family of his brother-in-law and top White House aide, Jared Kushner, is reportedly negotiating a deal with a Chinese firm that analysts are calling unusually favorable to the Kushners.
When Trump leaves the presidency, he will reclaim control of his family business, and directly pocket whatever profits his presidency led to. And Republicans don't care in the slightest, which is how you know that this is not simply the tale of one crooked man, but the tale of an apparently uniformly crooked party. If any non-Republican president had done the same, there would be hearings daily. There would be new conservative television programs devoted solely to daily updates of the scandal. It would be, in the eyes of the party, corruption so egregious as to be a danger to the republic itself.
But they're not saying a peep about it. There are no investigations. There are no calls for investigations. Party heads appear on television to pooh-pooh calls for investigations, and to smirkingly dismiss notions that such acts might even be improper to begin with.
And that, and nothing else, is the true story of the Trump presidency. Not that Donald Trump sought to profit off his government office, or staffed his White House with persons of similar mind (Price) and intent (Tillerson), but that the Republican Party response to the rapid collapse of long-held ethical standards and requirements was a declaration those ethical boundaries had been voluntary all along—and now, by collective party edict, no longer apply.